Vision-guidance of agricultural vehicles

A vision guidance system has been designed, built and commissioned which steers a tractor relative to the rows of a crop such as cotton. It was required to be insensitive to additional visual noise from weeds, while tolerating the fading out of one or more rows in a barren patch of the field. The system integrates data from several crop rows, testing for image quality. At the same time, the data processing requirements have been limited by the use of frame-sequential strategies to reduce the image space which must be processed. The design has been developed to the stage where six evaluation prototypes have been installed to test farmer-acceptance. The present prototypes employ a 486 PC motherboard embedded in a custom housing, together with a 68HC11 microcomputer to which the task of closing the steering servo loop is delegated. The system shows great promise for cost effective commercial exploitation.Experimental results are reported and further sensing systems are outlined for performing related guidance tasks when vision is inappropriate.